Can Google Nowcast the Market Trend of Iranian Mobile Games?

The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life. In this paper, we investigate if the Internet behavior of consumers correlates with their actual behavior in computer games market. In particular, we aim to investigate to what extent Web search data can be exploited to predict the ranking of mobile games in the world. Based on our findings that show the existence of such correlations, we use web search data (from Google) about mobile games in Iran to nowcast (predict the present status of) the ranking of Iranian mobile games.

Keywords:

Web search data , Google trends , mobile games , popularity nowcast , market trends